Bill forbidding pumping water into aquifer for storage will get no vote this year

ATLANTA — Legislation to make permanent a ban on injecting water into the Florida Aquifer stalled Tuesday in a Senate committee.

Many states, including Florida, rely on a process called aquifer storage and recovery to pump treated water into the underground caverns of the natural aquifer during periods of plentiful rain. Then the water is pumped back out for use during droughts.

Senate Bill 306, introduced last year by Brunswick Republican Sen. William Ligon, to prevent aquifer storage and recovery effectively died in the Senate Natural Resources Committee when the chairman said there would be no vote on the bill this session. Instead, Chairman Ross Tolleson said separate legislation would pass creating a committee to study it before the next legislative session.

“I think people need to understand what they’re doing,” said Tolleson, R-Perry.

This isn’t a new issue. The legislature first imposed the injection moratorium in 1999 and renewed it four times. The latest is set to expire July 1, so with the failure of SB 306, there would be no ban on injections until the General Assembly can act again in the 2015 session.

The Environmental Protection Division would still have to issue a permit for injection, the agency’s lobbyist, Russ Pennington, told the committee while opposing the bill.

“Aquifer storage and recovery is a proven technology that half of the states are using as a water-management technique,” he said, noting that many of Georgia’s water-management districts also listed it as a viable option in their long-range plans. “[However] there are no planned [aquifer storage and recovery] projects in the coastal zone.”

The EPD and business groups like the Agribusiness Council oppose the ban because they say it removes a water-management option, especially in South Georgia where the terrain is too flat for building surface reservoirs deep enough to prevent significant evaporation. On the other hand, environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Georgia Water Coalition favor it because they say accidental contamination of the huge aquifer could make all of it unusable.

“We have to be careful because this is our only source of drinking water,” Ligon said.

The Georgia Water Coalition immediately denounced Tolleson and the EPD.

“It’s unacceptable that our state EPD supports letting the moratorium that protects our coastal drinking water supply expire,’’ Ogeechee Riverkeeper Emily Markesteyn said in a Georgia Water Coalition release.

The Water Coalition said that pumping chemically treated water underground threatens all Georgia aquifers and the water supplies of hundreds of thousands of Georgians.

The practice could increase the level of arsenic to levels that exceed drinking water standards while introducing bacteria, pathogens and disinfection byproducts into Georgia’s aquifers as it has in other places where the practice has been used, the coalition said.

Satilla Riverkeeper Ashby Nix said that the moratorium is an important protection for the drinking water of most people in coastal Georgia.

“We deserve to have our drinking water source protected from contamination, as does everyone else,’’ Nix said.